Let's familiarize ourselves with the Spring RCP. New life seems to have been blowing into this project: after almost two years of hiatus, the 1.0.0 release came out a few months ago. Let's leave aside the question about its direction and so on and, instead, let's look purely at the technology itself to see exactly what it offers. In that light, I've made available a simple plugin for NetBeans IDE that provides samples and templates to get things started. Below, I walk through a basic scenario using the plugin. However, even those who are not NetBeans users could learn a lot about Spring RCP by reading the steps in this tutorial and the explanations that accompany them.